variety.com: Approximately one-third of the Netflix true crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” takes place on set of “The Dating Game,” where real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala was a contestant in the 1970s. So, production designers for the Anna Kendrick-directed film had two missions: to accurately recreate the well-known set and to make that colorful, cheery space highlight the irony of a murderer’s participation on a romantic game show.
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Production designer Brent Thomas has a great quote in the article on his design process: “My thing was, research, research, research, and then throw it all away…You never just illustrate something. You dramatize it.” I love this outlook. As designers, we are taught that our work should always be rooted in research, especially when it comes to a period piece like Woman of the Hour (which takes place on the set of a 70s game show). But beyond a responsibility to accuracy and realism, there is also a narrative imperative—we’re not just recreating a moment in time, we’re using it to get a message across. In Woman of the Hour, that message is about the treatment of women by society. Thomas uses bright colors, fast-moving lights, and strategically placed walls to make the audience feel just as vulnerable as the film’s protagonist, Sheryl. It’s not just a recreation, it’s a completely new vision using the tools he got from his research.
I am very excited to start watching this show. I have heard a lot about Woman of the Hour, from the amount of care that was put into the portrayal, to creators talking about the importance of having a woman direct the series. The interview I watched was Anna Kendrick talking about this, specifically in relation to the apartment scene, where she talked about how the woman's reaction to Alcala asking to take a picture of her, while glaringly obvious as being one of panic to female viewers, was too subtle for some male audience members. The series highlights and subverts a lot of the sexist rhetoric that usually plagues serial killer documentaries, and it makes an example of the things that many directors have chosen to ignore. The care that Brent Thomas put into the dating game set, the way that he took reality as inspiration and not imitation, is reflected in the way the scene is played, with questions being changed to add to the feel of the series. This, in my opinion, is a good outlook of the idea of taking artistic liberty when portraying real life, an idea that is so easy to do poorly, and I think the success of the final product speaks to the incredible work of the designers.
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